By David D’Arcy

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, in the midst of the usual well-meaning social documentaries and “independent” celebrity tributes, some real cinematic ambition crept in.

A scene from Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat. Photo: Courtesy of Sundance

The most cinematic doc for me was Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat, a grim look back at the backroom fights and bloody battles for control of the former Belgian Congo in 1960 and early 1961.The film chronicles what was known as The Congo Crisis in a two-and-a-half hour chain reaction of jump cuts — a mix of imperial hubris and horror on the ground. Once Belgium was pushed into ceding independence to the vast colony that was once the personal property of the country’s ruling family, the US and Belgium immediately maneuvered to grab control of Katanga, the province richest in natural resources that was once managed by a Belgian mining company). The company, Union Minière, never left. Thousands of Congolese did –horizontally.

Much of the world was watching the carnage. Newly independent countries were attempting to exert influence at the UN and, assuming there was strength in numbers, they supported the efforts of Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961), the Congo’s new prime minister. The charismatic and persuasive Lumumba was exactly the kind of man the former colonial power didn’t want as a leader of the new Congo. (Lumumba’s liaison to the press was the crafty and glamorous Andrée Blouin, a fixer in his cabinet who could be a film in herself.)

The US and UK made it clear they saw Lumumba as a troublesome nuisance, someone who might disappear (or be disappeared) sooner rather than later.

As fighting on the ground worsened, the UN retreated, claiming neutrality. By the end of 1960, Lumumba was arrested. He was murdered in early 1961, by Belgian mercenaries and hired fighters. His body and those of his associates were decomposed with sulfuric acid.  Access to the diamonds and the uranium of Kantanga was assured.

The Congolese who elected Lumumba and Black Americans had hoped that the UN Security Council would intervene to block a coup d’etat imposed from outside of the country. Instead, Dag Hammarskjold, the then secretary general, cited neutrality and refused to help Lumumba fight off a mutiny from his own president. Hammarskjold later died in a plane crash in Africa that many believe was no accident.

The US-supported campaign wasn’t just assisted by force of arms. The US used jazz as a diplomatic salve to smooth over its relationship with the Congo. No less than Louis Armstrong was sent on a goodwill tour in 1960 to perform in the country with this band. According to the film, when Armstrong learned about the upheaval — and that his country was helping topple the Lumumba regime — he threatened to renounce his citizenship. The Voice of America never stopped playing jazz. Also in the Congo, the German government hosted classical musicians to play for the white mercenaries (among them ex-Nazis) who were hired to maintain the new colonial order. In the hyper-violent 1968 British action film about the Congo Crisis, The Dark of the Sun, the white mercenaries (with Nazis among them) are portrayed as the heroes, sent by the government to retrieve $50 million in diamonds from a locked vault in territory controlled by bloodthirsty African fighters called Simbas.

There’s yet another dimension to the doc. This was the Cold War, and the US and the USSR were trading accusations in the UN. Nikita Khrushchev denounced racial inequalities and killings in the US. We see him enjoying every minute of his harangue, banging on his desk as he hoped to rally new UN members to his side.

Yet Khrushchev, a friend to Black American in his speeches, hated jazz as much as he reviled abstract art: “When I hear jazz, it’s as if I have gas in the stomach.” If anyone were listening, it might have sounded odd that American jazz musicians and singers were lining up with Russia to support Lumumba. Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Nina Simone, along with Maya Angelou, were part of a demonstration at a meeting of the UN Security Council that exploded into a wild brawl. Soundtrack contains footage of the fracas as well as performances at the time by all the above, along with Dizzy Gillespie, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane and others. The music surges out between interviews with politicians and explosions of violence.  The film’s soundtrack is insistent, urgent, and unsettlingly raw — anything but the reassuring feel-good standards that Armstrong performed, albeit the tunes that he eventually refused to play. At one point, you hear Abbey Lincoln resort to screaming, and Gillespie’s trumpet was just as shrill.

Another recent documentary, Taking Venice by Amei Wallach (DOC NYC 2023), addresses the Cultural Cold War as it focuses on Robert Rauschenberg’s acceptance of the Grand Prize at the 1964 Venice Biennial. His sculptures traveled from the US in a military plane and were shown in a US government-owned building. Rauschenberg’s odd combinations of animal parts and castoff fabrics were decried by many as signifying the end of respectable art — not by the Soviets, but by the French, especially the left wing French press. It was a lot of fuss over a fait accompli. By 1964, Paris had already lost its position as the center of the art world.

In 1960 the future of the Congo was still in play, although the new country lacked the resources to defend itself and the UN, as we are shown by Grimonprez, failed to step into the breach.

Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat is an ambitious film. There’s so much research behind it that the director ends up putting footnotes on the screen. Given Grimonprez’s previous films — on subjects from Alfred Hitchcock to the technology of surveillance — we should not have expected anything less. Some critics have faulted the doc for leaving story lines unresolved at the end. I don’t. If anything, the history of the Congo and its pillaging by the great powers is a tragic work in progress — with the corporate world scrambling after its minerals, and Russia now syphoning off resources from neighboring countries that, like the Congo in 1960, can’t defend themselves.

At least the music survived..

A scene from The Porcelain War. Photo: courtesy of Sundance

Speaking of Russian aggression, the US/Ukrainian film Porcelain War won Sundance’s top award in the U.S. Documentary competition. We watch artists like co-director Slava Leontyev, displaced from Crimea since 2014, train young soldiers by day — “don’t shoot yourself” — and make art when they can find the time. The works in the title are small porcelain animal figurines, fired (what a verb) by Ukrainians who are also killing the enemy with a range of weapons. That fighting, along with radiant scenes of landscapes untouched by war, was shot partly with drones, partly on cameras mounted on soldiers’ bodies, with footage sent to co-director Brendan Bellomo in Los Angeles. Freedom, among its many other virtues, is about having the privilege to make harmless objects. For now, at least.

A scene from War Game. Photo: courtesy of Sundance

War Game, a film best described as hybrid, is an unscripted, imaginary scenario about an insurrection in the very near future that rallies support from the military. (Think of 1964’s Seven Days in May, although Barry Goldwater never contested the 1964 landslide.) Government leaders scramble to keep the country intact at a command center underground in Washington D.C.; they are pondering possible courses of action as they would in a war. Real politicians (former governor Steve Bullock of Montana, retired Gen. Wesley Clark, former senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota) play characters who face an uprising by (thespian) armed rebels. Beyond the logistical achievement of a mostly improvised film shot in an enclosed space with multiple cameras that you don’t see, the movie creates an atmosphere of dread.

Directed by Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, War Game had its origins in the VetVoice Foundation, a group of veterans headed by former US Marine officer Janessa Goldbeck. Members were alarmed by the support for election-denying among the US military. Some of the veterans see the threat of another Right Wing putsch as imminent. They also see how the media, normalizing rhetoric about armed insurrection, is treating dangerous talk as just another part of the numbing political noise.

War Game supplies some gripping drama. These are US veterans warning us — it’s not just a movie.

David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.